Doing and denying sexism: online responses to a New Zealand feminist campaign against sexist advertising

In 2012 a New Zealand feminist group launched a campaign against a series of local beer advertisements they deemed “retro-sexist.” The campaign generated media coverage across a range of viewpoints, but drew a largely negative response from the online public. This article analyses a comprehensive corpus of 753 online comments responding to news of the campaign. We discuss the dominant discursive constructions of gender and of feminists, and the ways these were deployed to trivialise the campaign, demonise the feminist campaigners, and depoliticise the issues. The comments overall, ironically, simultaneously disavow and perform sexism in this online public space. This imbrication of the denial and doing of sexism creates a hostile reception for public feminist voices, potentially dampening the field of possibility for action against sexism within mediated culture.     

An extended proportional hazards model for interval-censored data subject to instantaneous failures

Lifetime Data Analysis - The proportional hazards (PH) model is arguably one of the most popular models used to analyze time to event data arising from clinical trials and longitudinal studies. In...     

Size performance of some tests in one-way anova

Tsui and Weerahandi (1989) introduced the notion of generalized p-values and since then this idea is used to solve many statistical testing problems. Heteroskedasticity is one of the major practical problems encountered in ANOVA problems. To compare the means of several groups under heteroskedasticity approximate tests are used in the literature. Weerahandi (1995a) introduced a test using the notion of generalized p-values for comparing the means of several populations when the variances are not equal. This test is referred to as a generalized F-test.

In this paper we compare the size performance of the Generalized F-test and four other widely used procedures: the Classical F-test for ANOVA, the F-test obtained by the weighted least-squares to adjust for heteroskedasticity, the Brown-Forsythe-test, and the Welch-test. The comparison is based on a simulation study of size performance of tests applied to the balanced one-way model. The intended level of the tests is set at 0.05. While the Generalized F-test was found to have size not exceeding the intended level, as heteroskedasticity becomes severe the other tests were found to have poor size performance. With mild heteroskedasticity the Welch-test and the classical ANOVA F-test have the intended levels, and the Welch-test was found to perform better than the latter. Widely used (due to computational convenience) weighted F-test was found to have very serious size problems. The size advantage of the generalized F-test was also found to be robust even under severe deviations from the assumption of normality.     

A general method of inference for two-parameter continuous distributions

Abstract

This article presents a general method of inference of the parameters of a continuous distribution with two unknown parameters. Except in a few distributions such as the normal distribution, the classical approach fails in this context to provide accurate inferences with small samples.Therefore, by taking the generalized approach to inference (cf. Weerahandi, 1995 Weerahandi, S. (1995). Exact Statistical Methods for Data Analysis. New York: Springer Verlag. [Google Scholar]), in this article we present a general method of inference to tackle practically useful two-parameter distributions such as the gamma distribution as well as distributions of theoretical interest such as the two-parameter uniform distribution. The proposed methods are exact in the sense that they are based on exact probability statements and exact expected values. The advantage of taking the generalized approach over the classical approximate inferences is shown via simulation studies.

This article has the potential to motivate much needed further research in non normal regressions, multiparameter problems, and multivariate problems for which basically there are only large sample inferences available. The approach that we take should pave the way for researchers to solve a variety of non normal problems, including ANOVA and MANOVA problems, where even the Bayesian approach fails. In the context of testing of hypotheses, the proposed method provides a superior alternative to the classical generalized likelihood ratio method.     

Soap operas,women, and the nation: Sri Lankan women’s interpretations of home-grown mega teledramas

This essay examines the place of home-grown soap operas, known as mega teledramas, in the lives of women in the South Asian island nation of Sri Lanka. While female audiences are often vilified for their consumption of mega teledramas in Sri Lanka, this study finds that these narratives have assumed a social role in women’s friendship networks, becoming a shared cultural source in their everyday lives. The representations in the mega teledramas were offering a range of diverse meanings to the women and their readings of women protagonists, central to the narratives, were intrinsically linked with nationally constructed notions of womanhood.     

Digital media,ageing and faith: Older Sri Lankan migrants in Australia and their digital articulations of transnational religion

To date, older adults have received little attention in the newly emerging technological narratives of transnational religion. This is surprising, given the strong association of later life with spiritual and religious engagement, but it likely reflects the ongoing assumption that older adults are technophobic or technologically incompetent. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with older Sinhalese Buddhist migrants from Sri Lanka, living in Melbourne, this paper explores the digital articulations of transnational religion that arise from older migrants’ uses of digital media. We focus on how engagements with digital media enable older Sinhalese to respond to an urgent need to accumulate merit in later life, facilitating their temporal strategies for ageing as migrants. We argue that these digital articulations transform both the religious imaginary and the religious practices that validate and legitimize a life well-lived.